An Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery

Service discovery has been a very active research field attracting many researchers around the world. Most of the previous research efforts on service discovery have been based on the ternary classification of participant roles in web services, including service providers, brokers, and consumers. This classification is insufficient because it fails to make a difference between application developers and end users who both belong to service consumers. As a result, application developers usually take the responsibility of seeking services while end users who ultimately use the application are ignored. In order to address this issue, this paper presents an Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery. The proposed approach is motivated from two industrial protocols: Android Intents and web Intents. It improves the two protocols by a generic model from the aspects of architecture, intent messages and their resolving process, Intents services, and user agents. It classifies the implicit intents into authoritative and naïve intents and is compatible with the current web service triangular architecture. This paper also illustrates a way of creating Intents services from SOAP and REST web services and presents two cases to demonstrate some benefits of the proposed approach.     

Opening web applications for third-party development: a service-oriented solution

Web applications are nowadays prevalent software systems in our everyday’s life. A lot of these applications have been developed for end users only. Thus, they are not designed by considering future extensions that would be developed by third parties. One possible and interesting solution for opening these applications for such kind of extension development is to create and deploy Web services starting from these applications. In this paper, we present a method and a tool for semiautomatically creating Web service implementations from applications having Web interfaces. The proposed method generates operations that are published in Web services for each functionality provided by a Web application. In addition, it generates new operations starting from Web interfaces. Our approach goes further in the creation of services by generating executable orchestrations, as BPEL processes, starting from navigations in the Web interfaces of these applications and by providing BPMN choreography specifications starting from the collaborations between the generated Web services. We implemented and experimented our solution in the migration of three real-world Web applications toward Web service-oriented systems.     

Assessment of the Impact of Stormwater Characteristics on Clogging in Stormwater Filters

Hydraulic conductivity of granular filter media and its evolution over time is a key design parameter for stormwater filtration and infiltration systems that are now widely used in management of polluted urban runoff. In fact, clogging of filter media is recognised as the main limiting factor of these stormwater treatment systems. This paper focuses on the effect of stormwater characteristics on the clogging of stormwater filters. Effect of five different operational regimes has been tested in this study of sediment concentration; pollutant concentrations; stormwater sediment size; loading rate and stormwater loading/dosing regime and compared with the Base case. For each operational condition, five column replicates were tested. Results suggest that sediment concentration in stormwater is a significant parameter affecting hydraulic and treatment performance, eventually affecting longevity of these stormwater treatment systems. Further, the size of sediments (and their relation to the size of filter media grains) in stormwater was found to be an important parameter to be considered in design of coarse filters with high infiltration rates that are used for stormwater treatment. As expected, the addition of metals and nutrients had limited or no contribution to changes in hydraulic or sediment removal performance of the studied stormwater filters. Whilst loading rate was found to be an important parameter affecting the hydraulic and treatment performance of these systems, any variation in the stormwater loading regime had a limited effect on their performance. This study therefore develops an understanding of the effect of catchment characteristics on design of filters and hence their longevity and maintenance needs.     

A logarithmic complexity divide-and-conquer algorithm for multi-flexible-body dynamics including large deformations

A new algorithm is presented for the modeling and simulation of multi-flexible-body systems. This algorithm is built upon a divide-and-conquer-based multibody dynamics framework, and it is capable of handling arbitrary large rotations and deformations in articulated flexible bodies. As such, this work extends the current capabilities of the flexible divide-and-conquer algorithm (Mukherjee and Anderson in Comput. Nonlinear Dyn. 2(1):10–21, 2007), which is limited to the use of assumed modes in a floating frame of reference configuration. The present algorithm utilizes the existing finite element modeling techniques to construct the equations of motion at the element level, as well as at the body level. It is demonstrated that these equations can be assembled and solved using a divide-and-conquer type methodology. In this respect, the new algorithm is applied using the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) (Shabana, 1996). The ANCF is selected because of its straightforward implementation and effectiveness in modeling large deformations. It is demonstrated that the present algorithm provides an efficient and robust method for modeling multi-flexible-body systems that employ highly deformable bodies. The new algorithm is tested using three example systems employing deformable bodies in two and three spatial dimensions. The current examples are limited to the ANCF line or cable elements, but the approach may be extended to higher order elements. In its basic form, the divide-and-conquer algorithm is time and processor optimal, yielding logarithmic complexity O(log(N _b )) when implemented using O(N _b ) processors, where N _b is the number of bodies in the system.     

Generalized Post Embedding Problems

The Regular Post Embedding Problem extended with partial (co)directness is shown decidable. This extends to universal and/or counting versions. It is also shown that combining directness and codirectness in Post Embedding problems leads to undecidability.     

DCT-based objective quality assessment metric of 2D/3D image

With the increasing growth of multimedia applications over the networking in recent years, users have put forward much higher requirements for multimedia quality of experience (QoE) than before. One of the representative requirements is the image quality. Therefore, the image quality assessment ranging from two-dimension (2D) image to three-dimension (3D) image has been getting much attention. In this paper, an efficient objective image quality assessment metric in block-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding is proposed. The metric incorporates properties of human visual system (HVS) to improve its validity and reliability in evaluating the quality of stereoscopic image. This is fulfilled by calculating the local pixel-based distortions in frequency domain, combining the simplified models of local visibility properties embodied in frequency domain, which consist of region of interest (ROI) mechanism (visual sensitivity), contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and contrast masking effect. The performance of the proposed metric is compared with other currently state-of-the-art objective image quality assessment metrics. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed metric is highly consistent with the subjective test scores. Moreover, the performance of the metric is also confirmed with the popular IRCCyN/IVC database. Therefore, the proposed metric is promising in term of the practical efficiency and reliability for real-life multimedia applications.     

Low-cost image indexing for massive database

According to the trend in the modern society that utilizes various image related services and products, the amount of images created by diverse personal and industrial devices is immeasurably voluminous. The adoption of very uncommon or unique identifiers or index attributes with admissible storage requirement and adequate data representation enables massive image databases to process demanded operations effectively and efficiently. For the last decades, various content-based image retrieval techniques have been studied and contributed to support indexing in large digital image databases. However, the complexity, high processing cost of the content-based image retrieval techniques might create inefficiency regarding the configuration of a high-performance image database even though satisfying their own objectives. Moreover the indexing methods with the property of low cardinality might need additional indexing in order to provide strong uniqueness. In this paper, we present identifier generation methods for indexing which are efficient and effective in the perspective of cost and indexing performance as well. The proposed methods exploit the distribution of line segments and luminance areas in an image in order to compose identifiers with high cardinality. From the experimental evaluation, we’ve learned that our approaches are effective and efficient regarding processing time, storage requirement and indexing performance.     

Interference impacts on 60 ghz real-time online video streaming in wireless smart tv platforms

In this paper we provide a method for computing and estimating the impact of interference on real-time online 1080p@30Hz and 1080p@60Hz high-definition video streaming in 60 GHz wireless smart TV platforms. The analysis involves two different interference scenarios: 1) downlink interference from deployed 60 GHz access points to the associated mobile ad-hoc devices, and 2) uplink interference from randomly deployed 60 GHz ad-hoc mobile devices to their associated access points. With these interference scenarios, the interference impact on the quality of main 1080p@30Hz and 1080p@60Hz wireless high-definition video streaming with various simulation settings are measured and estimated in terms of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio.     

Game-based creativity assessment system: the application of fuzzy theory

“Creative development” and “creativity” have become important topics in the field of education research. The assessment of creativity is a key to understanding how instructional strategies influences the creative process and the output of learners. At present, most methods of assessing creativity are paper-and-pencil tests scored by individuals. Despite the professional training of evaluators, subjectivity in scoring assessments remains inevitable. Therefore, a completely objective tool of measurement is crucial for the progress of education to eliminate the subjectivity in manual grading. This paper presents at first place a review of the literature related to the development of creativity, the assessment of creativity, and further on the means of measuring creativity, particularly in a digital game environment. Our focus is on the application of computing technologies for the assessment of creativity, while exploring the possibility of using computerized systems such as fuzzy logic and hybrid methods to produce objective measurement results. The results of Pearson correlation coefficient between the fuzzy inference scores and the Williams CAP scores is 0.805, which shows the strong construct validity. Additionally, the fuzzy inference system can eliminate subjectivity in scoring and provide analysis results to enhance creativity, unlike paper-and-pencil scores provided without explanations.